(tool-bar-mode -1) appears to be the magic
incantation to turn off the toolbar in emacs 21. thanks a.
p. garcia and Sean Neakums.

so i've been secretly recoding the backend for my community weblog. i wrote
the last version a year ago. having spent the last year
writing a few hundred lines of perl a day, my skills have
improved and it pains me to look at the old code.

one of the features that i've come to rely on heavily is
the web-based
categorized, hierarchical bookmarks. however, i'm
thinking for the new version i'll abandon the inherent
problems of categories and hierarchies and switch to keyword
tagging. while thinking about it last night, i realized that
it's inherently a more powerful system. with categories, i
could place a bookmark in "programming/xml/tutorials". with
keywords, i can duplicate this just by tagging it with
'programming','xml', and 'tutorials' but still be free to
add other keywords like 'functional programming'.

there were ways to essentially do this within a
hierarchical structure by either making copies of the
bookmark in multiple categories or implementing something
like symbolic links. either way, things are ugly and get
uglier if your hierarchy isn't well thought-out from the
beginning. keywords seem like an elegant way to sidestep
these problems.

thinking about this has renewed my interest in
filesystems like reiserfs that begin to implement the
'filesystem as a database' idea. must research further. must
code more first.